Sue Gyford: Snooping on your children may keep them safe online

Published on Monday 23 November 2009 08:39

IT IS one of modern parenting's greatest conundrums: how do you keep your children safe online when they know more about the internet than you do?

As the complexity of social networking sites grows, so do concerns that young people could be surfing into danger right under their parents' noses. Last week it was announced that Operation Defender in Central Scotland had uncovered more than 200 internet paedophiles, prompting Chief Superintendent Gordon Mackenzie to say parents should be "intrusive in a positive way" over their children's internet usage, demanding to know their passwords and checking what sites they access.

Others say that rather than watching over every mouse click, it's more important to establish trust so your children can discuss their internet use with you.

Chief Superintendent Mackenzie's sentiments were in line with those of Lothian and Borders Assistant Chief Constable Iain Livingstone, who is also in charge of child protection within the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland (ACPOS).

At the end of October, after the conviction of internet paedophiles James Rennie and Neil Strachan, he launched Operation Alba, a Scotland-wide attempt to track down and prosecute other online abusers.

He said: "There is a responsibility for parents and carers to ensure that children are using the internet safely and sensibly. Just as we check who our children play with on a day to day basis we should have a keen awareness of who they are contacting through their computers. The friends they are chatting to online may not be all that they seem."

But it is not only a matter of looking out for predatory paedophiles. Other worries include cyber-bullying and commercial sites which encourage users to enter their addresses and personal details.

Most parents are familiar with filters which block their children from accessing particular sites, but these can't control what they do on permitted sites – who they talk to and what they say.

Nicola Sanders is senior education consultant for Childnet International, a charity set up to try and make the internet safe for children.

She warns that an overly-intrusive approach can damage the trust between children and their parents: "It's not so much that we expect parents to check all their children's Facebook sites or their instant messaging conversations - I don't think parents necessarily want to see what their children are writing about anyway, but they can get their children to be their teachers, to get them to explain how they safeguard themselves.

"It's about having what we like to call 'dishwasher moments' where you're maybe unpacking the dishwasher together and you say 'What would you do if you got sent a nasty message by somebody in your class?' rather than having a heavy, sit-down conversation about it."

The important thing, she says, is to ensure your children grow up happy to talk to you about their internet use, rather than spying on their every move: "If you set ground rules when kids are young, they grow up with this expectation that if anything goes wrong they'll involve you.

"We all know how easy it is to accidentally view pornography websites or gambling websites and if you overreact in that situation they're less likely to come to you if something else goes wrong."

Her approach to computer use is echoed by those responsible for online safety in Edinburgh schools. The city council's acting ICT development manager, Len Timson, has been helping to keep school internet users safe since they first went online a decade ago. He says all 14,000 computers in Edinburgh's schools are under the same kind of filter as most corporate computer networks, banning the most risky sites, such as those with pornography or gambling.

There is another filter which allows head teachers to choose appropriate limits for different ages of pupil, and the emphasis is on individual schools choosing the most suitable approach for them. Mr Timson says: "Teachers are best placed to decide what's helpful in class and what isn't, just as they would with teaching materials and library books. I think we're probably quite unusual among Scottish local authorities in that we don't take a 'Thou shalt not' attitude. We do the delegation but we're there to support, we want to help people understand what's going on."

The decision over whether to allow the use of social networking sites at school is also left to headteachers. He says: "Social networking is kind of controversial. Obviously there are some quite inspired teachers who can use these applications for learning and teaching and communications with parents, but what we really need to do is reiterate to head teachers that if they decide to allow that, they need to be careful of the risks. We're saying 'If you want it, that's fine, but please be aware of the potential for risk', as opposed to saying 'Absolutely not'."

Ms Sanders says that while the virtual world might be new to parents and teachers, its principles are not so different to the real world – most parents would rather educate their children about "stranger danger" than hold their hand every day, and the same applies online.

She says: "It's about working together to use the technology safely rather than prying or going behind their backs.

"There are offline lessons that you carry to the online world. It's not necessarily about a whole new approach, it's just about a sensible approach to parenting in a new environment."